Obsidian for web

Feature requests
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239

Most likely it would, unless your company has absolutely no data classification scheme nor rules about where can information about company or client can be stored, both in terms of contracts between your company and their clients or local regulation that might apply to them.

Obsidian being local and storing data on my computer is the sole reason I can use it in a professional context.

240

I think most corporate restrictions are not so much about data. Data exfiltration can get managed based on volume of traffic, or it will be relatively small data movements that will not be as valuable.

At my company the limitations are more about installing software which may or may not have backdoors and other such things which create bigger problems. Webapps resolve that by sandboxing everything within the browser, and limiting free, full access to the hard drive.

241

Are there any plans for this? Paying for Obsidian Sync, the service already has all the notes on the back-end anyway. I would expect it to let me at least view the notes from the browser. This is the only missing thing for me, otherwise Obsidian is better than anything else Iā€™ve used.

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242

The service does not house notes on Obsidian servers - it only syncs between our own individual storage devices.

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Iā€™m always, always for such apps to have a web version. Itā€™s the ultimate ā€œcross-platformā€ solution. I used to be a fan of Bear notes back in the day, and they had overwhelmingly high requests for a web version, which they later launched.

I stopped using Bear for unrelated reasons. But Iā€™d vote 100% for an Obsidian web version.

Huh? Literally the first line says Obsidian Sync is an add-on service that allows you to store your notes on Obsidian's servers and sync them across your devices privately.:

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244

This isnā€™t correct. Yes, the data is stored on their servers. Including for 30 days after your Sync subscription expires.

(Not that it means sharing this data to the web wouldnā€™t have security implications.)

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245

Best coment of forum, extremily necessary, to use at work

246

Of cource it would. I can not install any program at my work pc, how do you spect that i use obsidian??

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247

Still no news on this webapp? June 2025

248

Itā€™s been mentioned before that it would go against the manifesto. Link to the post.

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249

Doesnā€™t Sync go against the manifesto too then?

Weā€™re just asking for a webapp to view files that are already in Sync, on Obsidian servers.

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Just viewing files would be doable like GitHub.dev, but implementing Obsidian in the browser would be insanely hard. Currently, youā€™ll need something like VNC or KASM workspaces type systems to access it this way (which you can already do). As I said in my comment above, it would be hard to have a web-based system since Obsidianā€™s internal APIs rely on interfacing with a filesystem (and not an emulated one like from an SMB share). If your ā€œsingle source of truthā€ is Obsidian Sync though, it would be cool to be able to interface with that store with some access control. I would use Obsidian Sync in corporate if we could limit the access.

Putting Obsidian in the Browser would get people assuming multi-user or multi-device scenarios, and this complicates things. I currently use Obsidian Git and a GitHub repo as my single source of truth, and I edit things from GitHub.dev when I need to from a browser. The plugins and interactivity is the hard part since it needs a filesystem.

Iā€™ve got the solution though. Hereā€™s how you could actually get this working, and you could sell this service off or to Obsidian.md. This would allow you to work with Obsidian in the browser, in corporate settings, and with multiple users on the system at the same time despite it interfacing with a filesystem.

  1. You need something like a VNC interface like KASM workspaces uses. This allows you to still have plugins, but there is some added latency.
  2. To make things faster, and to make it possible for multiple users and simultaneous connections, you would need a ā€œlocal firstā€ approach and to implement a content conflict resolution process for the syncing piece of things. An example of this would be CRDT (conflict free replicate data types). This would be implemented in the Obsidian application maybe as a plugin, and this would actually solve all of the issues seen with using SMB shares too. There would need to be a way to track which files have been opened or locked or whatever, and then as the files are closed, use CRDT to resolve them or something. Lots of nuance here though and just some ideas really. This would be the hardest problem to solve.
  3. To make this better for corporate, you would need a layer maybe in something like KASM or the VNC piece that helps with IAM or access control. You would want this to be able to use all of the enterprise protocols.

This is the only way I could see Obsidian in the web without absolutely overhauling the Obsidian application or plugin ecosystem and approach.

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251

Iā€™m not a developer, but AFAIK for security reasons web browsers donā€™t have access to your file system, so Iā€™m not sure it would even be possible for a web app to manipulate a vault of local files like the obsidian app can

EDIT: Thatā€™s basically what the comment above is saying, sorry for not reading xD

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Technically chromium browsers can access the actual file system with permissions (although you have to grant it every time the site is opened, see vscode.dev), however, that isnā€™t implemented on Firefox and Safari AFAIK.

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I am also in favor of this.

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255

I registered an account just to add in a use case I havenā€™t seen in this thread: Game Assist. For those who havenā€™t had a lightbulb moment, letā€™s lay down some background info: Game Assist is a recent first-party widget for the Xbox Game Bar in Windows 11, and Xbox Game Bar is an overlay that can open over any fullscreen app without alt-tabbing to another program. Widgets running on this overlay can be pinned and they will stay on top of the screen semi-transparently. And the Game Assist widget is a browser.

Although Microsoft intended Game Assist to be used a tool to aid gamers who typically play games in fullscreen, it can run anything the Edge browser can. If anything wasnā€™t an overlayable widget before, they are now thanks to the Game Assist widget. So while Notepad is not a Game Bar widget, I can take note in the middle of using any application by calling up the Game Bar overlay, access a note-taking app in Game Assist, write down some notes and pin Game Assist semi-transparently as a reference against the app Iā€™m usingā€¦ if only said note-taking app runs in a browser.

Obsidianā€™s inability to be accessed in a browser is the only barrier standing in the way of this use case. I resent having to use the Notion web app for this. It works, but I resent the fact that itā€™s not offline. I think this is where you come in, Obsidian team. I am not requesting a live service to host my Obsidian vaults. I am requesting a local web interface to serve up my local vaults to a localhost port so that they become accessible to a browser and by extension - an overlayable widget in Windows. Everything still stays local, nothing moves off my computer, perfectly aligned with the spirit of Obsidian so we can skip that entire conversation.

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256

Using Obsidian on a Chromebook, via the linux app; vault is on google drive so that I can also use Obsidian on Windows